The Assassination of James Forrestal

by David Martin

  YOSHPE: It has often been said that the problems of trying to run the Defense establishment in the face of these difficulties undermined Forrestal’s health. Is there any truth in that?

  LOVETT: I wouldn’t say that those problems were the ones. Jim Forrestal was a very intense man anyway, but he had himself under strict control. He was never one to show emotion–containing that all the time was what I think put such extra tension on him. I remember that he was flown down to Hobe Sound after his breakdown. They phoned me and asked me if I would meet him, which I did—as I say, he was a very dear, close friend of mine. And when he got out of the plane over at the air base, we stood under the shadow of the tail plane because it was hot as the hinges at that time of day. When he came down and he offloaded his golf clubs, bag, and that sort of thing, I said to Jim, “I’m glad you brought your golf clubs because I’m going to take every dollar you’ve got here.” Not a crack of a smile, and he finally turned to me and said, “You know, they’re really after me.”

  I’d been warned, of course, by Eberstadt over the phone that Forrestal was in bad shape. But to shorten the story, he was at that time a completely different person from the one I knew. We finally got him back to Washington. Ed Shea, his roommate at Princeton, came up from Texas and stayed there with him, and slept in the room with him the whole time. But he obviously was in very bad shape.

  Now part of that tension was not the result of the problems of running the Department but the fact that he had been dabbling a little bit in politics. In other words, he had been dealing with the Republican side while a Democratic appointee. Not in any sly way but simply maintaining his position–I think he wanted to continue in the job in case of the change. I believe that had something to do with it. But that, I would say, would not be for publication.

  YOSHPE; Some of the material, including the Forrestal diaries, seemed to indicate that he had expected to stay on at least until May.

  LOVETT: He had hoped, I think, to stay on. He was obsessed with the idea that his phone calls were being bugged and that “they” (it was hard to identify they) were some anti-Forrestal group in the Administration. They, the enemy, who was it? He was not of sound mind, in my view.

  That’s it. No examples are given to illustrate Forrestal’s unsoundness of mind but the ones you see here. There is no talk of suicide and no mention of any suicide attempt. There is also no mention of suspicion of bugged beach umbrella sockets (although if one were to try to record conversations on a beach, putting bugs in pre-installed umbrella sockets would seem to be the best way to do it), nor is there any talk of Forrestal running out of his room in the middle of night claiming the Russians were attacking when a police siren awakened him. This latter tale is a story reported by Drew Pearson in his nationally syndicated column, but dismissed as untrue by Hoopes and Brinkley.

  But Pulitzer Prize winner, Thomas Powers, reported in The Man Who Kept the Secrets, citing Daniel Yergin that not only did Forrestal say that “they” were after him, but that he had actually run through the streets yelling,”The Russians are coming. The Russians are coming. They’re right around. I’ve seen Russian soldiers.” Then he goes on to say that he died trying to hang himself “from his hospital window, but slipped and fell sixteen stories to his death.”41

  Yergin’s reference for this story, and for Forrestal’s “at least one suicide attempt” at Hobe Sound, turns out to be none other than Arnold Rogow. The idea that Forrestal slipped and fell while trying to hang himself is apparently original with Powers. In the Ranelagh and Loftus and Aarons versions, the reason Forrestal ends up falling instead of hanging is that the sash broke, another fanciful account that these authors seem to have invented independently, that is, unless there is some propaganda-central supplying these authors. (Here we are reminded of the supposedly independent reports of authors Ronald Kessler [Inside the White House] and Judith Warner [Hillary Clinton, The Inside Story] that Vincent Foster’s pocket was where a hand-written list of psychiatrists turned up in that mysterious death case. That bit of evidence is inconsistent with the official story, which is that a search of Foster’s clothing turned up nothing—except two sets of keys after a second search of the body at the morgue.)42

  But we have not yet covered everything in the Lovett interview that bears upon the demise of James Forrestal:

  GOLDBERG: Another issue from this same period was raised with us by a number of people. It falls right into your State Department period. That was the Palestine problem. The Defense Department had very strong views on this, and the State Department did also.

  LOVETT: I was the agent in State who had to take the rap in this thing and do most of the ground work so I’ve a lively recollection. Pick some particular question –

  GOLDBERG; I really wanted to ask how State looked at the National Security aspects of the issue at that time. I know how the Defense Department was looking at it, and I’ve seen a lot of the State documents for the period, too, but we’re interested in hearing about it from your level and General Marshall’s.

  LOVETT: Well, you remember the American position set forth by Senator Austin at the United Nations meeting. It was, in effect, that this small country of a million and one half people, surrounded by 40 million Arabs, was non-viable unless it could be assured of an umbrella of some sort. It was on that basis that the theory of the trusteeship was developed which would give them an independent country, but place them in the hands of a group of trustees until such time as they either matured into a viable nation or until some method of living could be worked out with the Arabs.

  We were ultimately defeated on that. I say we, this country’s point of view did not prevail, and it didn’t prevail because it was fought vigorously by the Israelis. Now the atmosphere was embittered, and that was the thing which caused most of the attacks on Forrestal. In my view, it was one of the principal causes for his mental condition. The constant unrelenting attacks on Forrestal. I was less visible as a government official. They were bad enough, God knows, on me. I received telephone calls at 11 o’clock at night, with threats: “we’ll get you, you so and so.” And I got telegrams from every conceivable agency—Haganah, Hadassah, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver—everybody pressuring me to do this, that, and the other thing. Give these people independence. You give them independence and they get overrun—what do you do then? So it was a sense of conscience in this country, being willing to help them and not leading them down the garden path to utter destruction. It was a very serious problem.

  Compared to Forrestal, Lovett, by his own account, was relatively out of the line of fire over the Israel issue, but that did not prevent him from receiving late night threatening telephone calls and tons of pressure from all quarters. Lovett was subjected to none of the public vilification that Forrestal faced, so one can only imagine what Forrestal had to put up with privately.

  Forrestal Was Bugged

  Actually, we don’t have to depend completely upon imagination. We can take it from pro-Zionist authors John Loftus and Mark Aarons in their book, The Secret War against the Jews. They confide to us from their Zionist sources that they had attempted to blackmail Forrestal, as Loftus and Aarons say they had blackmailed Nelson Rockefeller to get his Latin American friends to line up in favor of the partition of Palestine by the United Nations. The method was to use recordings they had of his dealings with the Nazis when he had been president of the Wall Street investment-banking firm, Dillon, Read, and Company. They didn’t have enough on him to rein him in, they say, but it sent him around the bend in paranoia, convincing him that “his every word was bugged.”43

  Whether or not Forrestal’s “every word” was bugged would appear from this revelation to be little more than a quibble over the degree to which his avowed enemies clandestinely monitored his dealings. After all, how would the Zionists have come into possession of tapes of Forrestal’s most private business dealings except through the use of bugs and/or wiretaps? And if this account is to be believed, the fact of the monitoring ha
d already been revealed to Forrestal by this dastardly attempted blackmail, an attempt to get Forrestal to go against what he thought was best for the nation by playing upon a hoped-for fear of revelations possibly detrimental to his own personal interests.

  If the Zionists thought such rotten tactics, of which Loftus and Aarons seem almost to approve, would work on Forrestal, they had seriously misjudged their man. Hoopes and Brinkley have chosen the title of their Forrestal biography well, “Driven Patriot.” Not in this writer’s lifetime have we seen an American leader who has so determinedly and courageously put the interests of the American people first as did James Forrestal. At least twice that we know of, as Secretary of the Navy, he flirted with insubordination in the Truman administration in the waning days of the Pacific War. Through the Office of Naval Intelligence, he made unauthorized peace feelers toward the Japanese, ignoring our rigid public “unconditional surrender” terms that prolonged the war and resulted in the perhaps unnecessary bloody battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and the continued decimation of Japanese cities, culminating in the nuclear attacks on the defenseless and strategically unimportant cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.44 Later, though pointedly not a part of Truman’s official delegation, he would attend the Potsdam Conference outside the destroyed Berlin, taking with him on his flight the 28-year-old Navy veteran by the name of John F. Kennedy, the son of Forrestal’s powerful friend, Joseph P. Kennedy.45

  With regard to the Palestine question, Forrestal knew that he had all the leaders in the State Department and the military on his side. They knew that American interests would be compromised by the sponsorship of a new state made up primarily of recent European immigrants, smack in the heart of Arab territory, territory that was rich in oil upon which the West and our military apparatus had grown more dependent. He also feared greatly that we would be drawn in militarily in defense of the new and beleaguered little country against those with whom we should have a harmony of interests. Negotiations over Palestine were the direct responsibility of the State Department and the White House, so Forrestal was not really a player in the decisions that were made, but he was braver and more outspoken than was Secretary of State George C. Marshall, and he reckoned without the political weakness of Harry Truman, who personally had his own serious misgivings about the partition of Palestine and the creation of the Jewish state of Israel, but, as we have seen, he needed every last vote he could scare up to retain the presidency in 1948.46 In the final analysis, recognition of Israel proved to be a political winner for Truman because the Arabs still needed to sell their oil and we were their best market and the Israelis proved to be militarily a lot stronger than most people anticipated, and we did not need to send our own troops to defend them. In the longer run, however, Forrestal’s misgivings over America’s support for Israel have proved to be prescient, while, in the short run Forrestal managed to make of himself an object of “an outpouring of slander and calumny that must surely be judged one of the most shameful intervals in American journalism.”47

  More Zionist Weapons

  We learn some more about the extent of their clandestine weaponry from Walter Winchell biographer, Neal Gabler. Gabler tells us that after the outbreak of the war in Europe, Winchell might well have been the strongest public voice in the country urging American involvement on the side opponents of the detested Nazis. To Winchell, the members of the very influential America First Committee, led by famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, were no better than traitors. He began to regale his readers and listeners to his weekly radio broadcast with “inside information” on the connections between various conservative anti-war leaders and the Nazis. Most people assumed, says Gabler, that he must be getting most of that information from the FBI, but the fact was that Winchell was more of a source for the FBI than they were from him. His primary provider of inside information was Arnold Forster, the New York counsel for the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

  Forster, Gabler tells us, had a whole stable of spies who used all manner of clandestine methods to gather intelligence. It practically drove Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo crazy, says Gabler, “to see in the column or hear on the broadcast everything he said privately.”48

  The Winchell biographer, Gabler, by the way, is another one of those authors who draws very heavily upon Arnold Rogow in his account of Forrestal’s death. Publishing his Winchell biography in 1994, two years after the Hoopes and Brinkley biography of Forrestal, he makes explicit use of their account as well.

  The ADL has continued its clandestine activity in the United States:

  ADL Found Guilty of Spying by California Court

  By Barbara Ferguson, Arab News Correspondent

  WASHINGTON: The San Francisco Superior Court has awarded former Congressman Pete McCloskey, R-California, a $150,000 court judgment against the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

  McCloskey, the attorney in the case, represented one of three civil law-suits filed in San Francisco against the ADL in 1993. The lawsuit came after raids were made by the San Francisco Police Department and the FBI on offices of the ADL in both San Francisco and Los Angeles, which found that the ADL was engaged in extensive domestic spying operations on a vast number of individuals and institutions around the country.

  During the course of the inquiry in San Francisco, the SFPD and FBI determined the ADL had computerized files on nearly 10,000 people across the country, and that more than 75 percent of the information had been illegally obtained from police, FBI files and state drivers license data banks.

  Much of the stolen information had been provided by Tom Gerard of the San Francisco Police Department, who sold, or gave, the information to Ray Bullock, ADL’s top undercover operative.

  The investigation also determined that the ADL conduit, Gerard, was also working with the CIA.

  Two other similar suits against ADL were settled some years ago, and the ADL was found guilty in both cases, but the McCloskey suit continued to drag through the courts until last month.

  In the McCloskey case, the ADL agreed to pay (from its annual multi-million budget) $50,000 to each of the three plaintiffs Jeffrey Blankfort, Steve Zeltzer and Anne Poirier who continued to press charges against the ADL, despite a continuing series of judicial roadblocks that forced 14 of the original defendants to withdraw. Another two died during the proceedings.

  The ADL, which calls itself a civil rights group, continued to claim it did nothing wrong in monitoring their activities. Although the ADL presents itself as a group that defends the interests of Jews, two of three ADL victims are Jewish.

  Blankfort and Zeltzer were targeted by the ADL because they were critical of Israel's policies toward the Palestinians.

  The third ADL victim in the McCloskey case, Poirier, was not involved in any activities related to Israel or the Middle East. Poirier ran a scholarship program for South African exiles who were fighting the apartheid system in South Africa.

  At the time, the ADL worked closely with the then anti-apartheid government of South Africa, and ADL's operative Bullock provided ADL with illegally obtained data on Poirier and her associates to the South African government.

  But the conclusion of McCloskey's case does not mean the end to the ADL's legal problems.

  On March 31, 2001, US District Judge Edward Nottingham of Denver, Colorado, upheld most of a $10.5 million defamation judgment that a federal jury in Denver had levied against the ADL in April of 2000.

  The jury hit the ADL with the massive judgment after finding it had falsely labeled Evergreen, Colorado residents 'William and Dorothy Quigley; as "anti-Semites." The ADL is appealing the judgment.49

  Post-Mortem Smear Artists

  A couple of more things from Loftus and Aarons need comment upon. “At the end,” they say, “Forrestal allegedly could be heard ‘screaming that the Jews and the communists were crawling on the floor of his room seeking to destroy him.’” That is obviously a false statement, ranking right up there with this one from Jack Anderson:

 
While at Hobe Sound, Forrestal made three suicide attempts, by drug overdose, by hanging, and by slashing his wrists. On the night of April 1, the sound of a fire engine siren prompted him to rush out of the house in his pajamas screaming, “The Russians are attacking!”50

  Actually, the Loftus and Aarons observation is even worse, because it gives the impression that Forrestal’s mental state had continued to deteriorate while he was in the hospital, but we have seen from the observations of Henry Forrestal, Harry Truman, and Louis Johnson, and the statement to Dr. Raines to brother Henry that Forrestal was “essentially okay” and the general relaxation of his observation, that that was certainly not the case. Loftus and Aarons give Charles Higham as their reference.51 Higham, though, attributes his wild claims about Forrestal’s supposed behavior in his latter days in the hospital simply to unnamed newspaper reports. The author in his research has not encountered any-thing resembling such newspaper reports. Higham also writes that Forrestal was suffering from “advanced paranoid schizophrenia,” a claim that goes farther even than the unsupported claims of Rogow, and a charge that we should bear in mind as we learn more in the course of this book.

  So the end of the trail turns out to be anonymous “newspapers,” who if they ever reported such a thing were likely making it up themselves or had had it fed to them by someone who was. We might note, as well, how greatly this report of Forrestal’s condition in his final days contrasts with the observations of the man in charge of the hospital. Rear Admiral Willcutts told reporters right after Forrestal’s death that he was shocked and that after visiting with him on Friday he thought that he was “getting along splendidly.”52

  The Book on the Death

  Now let us have a closer look at Cornell Simpson’s virtually unknown work, mentioned by Hoopes and Brinkley only in an endnote disparagingly as a “murder-conspiracy” book.